The crypto industry seemed to age several decades over the past bull run, maturing in some places while barreling ahead in ambitious new pursuits, including DeFi, NFTs and web3. And while scams continued to proliferate and hacker heists became a weekly occurrence, the space onboarded an onslaught of retail investors and fostered feverish excitement among
admin
In the early hours on Monday, a Tesla Megapack battery caught fire at a key California power storage facility, the state’s largest utility said in a statement to TechCrunch. According to PG&E, the utility “became aware of a fire in one Tesla Megapack at its Elkhorn Battery Storage facility” at around 1:30 a.m. in Moss
Somehow, some way, the third quarter is nearly over. That means we’re gearing up for a wave of venture capital data that will start to drop in less than two weeks’ time. We’re itching to get our hands on the final numbers because the third quarter of 2022 is a pretty damn important data point.
Its 2015 acquisition of Aldebaran didn’t go as smoothly as SoftBank hoped. At the time, the French robotics startup was best known for its Nao, which had become a fairly ubiquitous presence in research facilities across the globe. The small humanoid robot formed the foundation for the rebranded SoftBank Robotics’ best-known creation, Pepper. Nao mostly
Earlier this summer, a Google exec admitted that TikTok was eating into its core Search business, particularly among younger users. But that’s not all TikTok is now being used for, a new Pew Research Center study indicates. According to the findings from a report that examined Americans’ use of social media for news consumption, 33%
“To be able to shitpost, you have to understand the subject matter really well,” Antimatter founder Jonathan Libov deadpans. “In a sense, shitposting is the highest form of consciousness.” Silly as it may sound, Libov is onto something. With a five-person team and a bit of venture funding, Antimatter is building the most memey educational
Amid the festivities at its fall 2022 GTC conference, Nvidia took the wraps off new robotics-related hardware and services aimed at companies developing and testing machines across industries like manufacturing. Isaac Sim, Nvidia’s robotics simulation platform, will soon be available in the cloud, the company said. And Nvidia’s Jetson lineup of system-on-modules is expanding with
InnovaFeed, a vertical insect farm operator that’s rearing insects for animal and plant nutrition, has raised $250 million in a series D round of funding led by Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund. While countless companies are developing alternative and more sustainable ways for humans to get their protein fixes such as through
Meet Nilos, a startup that wants to bridge the gap between crypto wallets and traditional business bank accounts. The company provides a dashboard that displays all your transactions — whether those are fiat transactions or crypto payments. From this platform, you can initiate payments and reconcile operations across multiple accounts. The startup raised a $5.2
The Peloton Row hasn’t been a particularly well-kept secret over the last couple of years. After long-standing rumors, the connected fitness firm teased the rowing machine in a member’s video back in May. Today it’s finally back with some firm details on the latest major addition to its home fitness offerings. The Row goes up
Metafy, a marketplace for video game coaching, laid off 23% of its staff last week, primarily impacting product, design and engineering teams, founder Joshua Fabian confirmed in an e-mail to TechCrunch. The layoff impacted 12 full-time employees. A Notion page has been created for those looking for their next jobs. Metafy has raised over $30
A group of former Meta engineers is building a platform to help enterprises deploy machine learning models at the speed of big tech companies. Their startup, TrueFoundry, has raised $2.3 million in a funding round. The San Francisco, California-headquartered startup automates repetitive tasks in the machine learning pipeline to allow data scientists and engineers to
Changes are incoming to draft online safety legislation in the UK which continues to attract controversy over the impact on free speech. The draft Online Safety Bill has already been years in the making but new prime minister Liz Truss signalled earlier this month that she wants “tweaks” to ensure it does not harm freedom
Swiftly Systems entered unicorn territory after announcing today that it grabbed another round of $100 million, this time in a Series C. The new funding was led by BRV Capital Management. If you’re feeling some déjà vu, you would be right: this is the second $100 million the retail technology company has raised in the
For more than half a decade, Zopper built a platform for small and medium-sized businesses, helping merchants with invoicing and payments through its point-of-sale platform. It sold that IP to PhonePe in mid-2018, but instead of joining the fintech giant, Zopper has been working on a new venture from scratch and independent of PhonePe. That
The world is headed for a food shortage by 2050 as its population increases, so anything to make it easier for farmers to grow food will go a long way. That’s what InnerPlant founder and CEO Shely Aronov is trying to do with her startup that uses plant physiology to gather loads of data to
When it comes to fintech, consumers have commanded the most attention in the last decade, with banking, credit, investing and other legacy services getting the disruption treatment. But at the same time, there’s been a growing trend for building more for the B2B market, and today one of the newer hopefuls in that space is
After initially disabling the capability, OpenAI today announced that customers with access to DALL-E 2 can upload people’s faces to edit them using the AI-powered image-generating system. Previously, OpenAI only allowed users to work with and share photorealistic faces and banned the uploading of any photo that might depict a real person, including photos of
Xpeng, a Chinese smart electric vehicle startup, has launched its anticipated advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) that automates some driving functions in urban environments. City Navigation Guided Pilot (City NGP), an expanded version of Xpeng’s NGP, which performed tasks like assisted driving on highways based on the navigation route set by the driver, is being
The ways in which we live and get around have evolved over the past few decades. For example, sales of e-bikes are outpacing sales of electric cars in the U.S., according to recent research. And, pre-fabricated and manufactured homes are gaining in popularity as housing shortages persist globally. It appears that their popularity is no
Car companies and battery manufacturers have scrambled over the last few years to secure critical minerals supplies, a race that’s only gotten more intense as consumers snap up every EV that comes off the production line. Demand is so high that the International Energy Agency believes the critical minerals market will grow sevenfold by the
Swedish last-mile delivery companies Instabox and Budbee have have announced plans to merge in a 18 billion krona ($1.7 billion) deal. The two companies, which were both founded out of the Stockholm area in 2015, serve as the delivery and logistics partner for major brands including multinational clothing retailer H&M, offering delivery services directly to
Apple has had support for eSIM since the iPhone Xs/XR, but this year it is going all in by ditching the physical SIM card slot for all iPhone 14 versions sold in the U.S. While models sold in other countries will have support for both physical and virtual SIM, Apple could eventually remove the SIM
The only daily news program focused exclusively on technology, innovation and the future of business from San Francisco.
There’s never a dull moment in the cryptoverse. Blockchain, DeFi and web3 technologies continue to evolve rapidly in a world of wild extremes. How extreme? Consider these two examples. The Terra ecosystem disappears in a multi-billion-dollar crash-and-burn while traditional investment firm Andreessen Horowitz closes a $4.5 billion crypto megafund. Then you have crypto’s ongoing regulatory
Michael Seibel is synonymous with Y Combinator’s growth over the past decade. He has opinions on bigger batch sizes, a growing standard deal, competition, the power of venture capital and why startup founders should be prioritizing more than just a check after Demo Day. Seibel spoke to TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, co-hosted by Natasha Mascarenhas and
Welcome to The Interchange! If you received this in your inbox, thank you for signing up and your vote of confidence. If you’re reading this as a post on our site, sign up here so you can receive it directly in the future. Every week, I’ll take a look at the hottest fintech news of
Investors don’t care about your product. Not really. Haje Jan Kamps 8 hours Investors think a great deal about a great number of things when considering an investment: How big is the market? How good is the founder-market fit? Is it venture-scale? It’s natural for founders to live and breathe for their customers and product,
Welcome to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by the daily TechCrunch+ column where it gets its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. Too many subscriptions? Many of us are feeling this way, and so are companies: In a downturn, cutting unnecessary expenses is more important than
Hello, friends! Welcome back to Week in Review, the newsletter where we quickly sum up the most read TechCrunch stories from the last sevenish days. The goal? Even if you’ve had a busy week, a quick skim of WiR should keep you in the (tech) loop. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up